Portside

Rightwing parties in Latin America give themselves populist names, keep the manifesto rhetoric modest and talk of appealing to the street. But they aren’t winning many votes. Meanwhile business is learning to work with governments of the left.

Today, as then, a group of Americans is denied the dignity of decent wages and working conditions. Today, just as then, powerful forces are threatening and intimidating vulnerable people for exercising their legal rights. Today, just like fifty years ago, people who have been treated as voiceless and disposable are standing up and demanding change.

The Environmental Protection Agency's forthcoming regulations on greenhouse gas emissions will provide legally required protection for the health and welfare of Americans at a cheap cost, while allowing states flexibility -- contrary to media fear mongering about the landmark standards.

Chicago began receiving program money in 2009, roughly a year after the housing market crashed. In the six years since, the city has collected $169 million — of which $140 million went to rehabbing and demolishing homes. But records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show the city spent money on buildings with luxury finishes in gentrifying areas while distressed properties in some of the city’s hardest hit neighborhoods were left to languish.

Fasanella copied no one: not Van Gogh, nor Grandma Moses or Edward Hicks. He was sui generis, and when his paintings finally came to be appreciated, it was for their uniqueness, not their adherence to any school or formal style. Most of all, they are celebrated for forcefully conveying the ideals he lived and worked by, as summarized in his motto: “Remember who you are. Remember where you came from. Don’t forget the past. Change the world.

African Americans have a long, rich history of cooperative ownership, especially in reaction to market failures and economic racial discrimination . . . My research suggests that African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the history of the United States -- from the introduction to Collective Courage

The safest place for contraception to be is in the mainstream of medical care—available through your regular doctor and local pharmacy and covered, like all other needed health services, by your insurance provider.

If you think this suggests that early animals started out simple and gradually evolved new features, and things like sponges branched off before they were added, you wouldn't be alone. Over the years, lots of researchers argued the same thing. But a recent genome sequence indicated that the oldest branch of the animal family tree that led to the comb jellies, with muscles, nerves, and tentacles, were an older branch than sponges.

According to a new white paper by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, our labyrinthine tax system is encouraging corporations to invest in creating jobs overseas, when unemployment remains doggedly high here at home, while giving US-based multinationals good reason to deprive our treasury of revenues when we should be investing in infrastructure and the American people.

Two new imaginative state proposals are now seeking to leverage the power of the public purse against executive excess. In California, lawmakers are zeroing in on how government taxes. New legislation pending in Rhode Island targets how government spends.